Artist Vs. Poet cover Taylor Swift, defend themselves

June 30th, 2011 James Shotwell

Artist Vs. Poet have released a cover of Taylor Swift’s hit single “Mean.” You can stream the cover, which we must admit is pretty incredible, below.

For those of you not keeping track, this is not exactly Artist Vs. Poet’s first cover song. In fact, the group has released a slew of them in the past year, so much so that many “fans” have begun to accuse them of becoming a “cover band.” The band responded to these accusations via Tumblr by saying:

Hey everyone,

we wanted to say a few things about us releasing so many cover songs because we have been hearing things like, “are you guys a cover band now?” or “I don’t want any more covers just new music”.

We want to clear this one up as fast as possible. NO WE ARE NOT A COVER BAND NOR DO WE WANT TO BE ONE. We have lots of new music and we have studio time booked to record and release this music, but recording original music takes time and there are lots of boring politics that go along with it. All of the changes we have gone through are not helping either. We honestly had hoped we would have had new music released by now, but unfortunately that is not the case. Doing these cover songs and videos are just our way of having fun and keeping things moving along. They are really simple to record in our home studio and easy to release without having to go through the label, producer, or mixing/mastering.

They also hopefully help everyone get a feel for what it is like to have Joe Kirkland as our new lead singer.

Thanks again to everyone who is being patient with us on the new music. We should have some studio updates for you guys in the upcoming weeks.

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.